I hesitate to sum up the present discussion with a short post, but I think I can. A true gun buyer, collector, accumulator, gun huckster, part time dealer, high volume shooter of interesting guns, or however you describe a guy who owns twenty or fifty Parkers, does not feed his collection with money earned solely at his day job. Over a lifetime, the owner of twenty or fifty Parkers has bought and sold many times that many marginal guns on the "buy low, sell high" principle. The nearly immediate profits from these transactions help to finance the twenty or fifty Parkers that are probably still in the gun room at the death of our collector. A five thousand dollar gun today would have to have been bought for a pretty low price to have kept up with forty years of inflation, but only if the gun were bought with money earned on the collector's day job. More often than not, this is not the case. Collectors are hucksters at heart and generally complete their deals with play money.
